Have never used cryptocurrency before, all I know is that Bitcoin transactions can be tracked, Monero is the most widely accepted untraceable cryptocurrency, and many exchanges enforce KYC. I do not presently have the hardware to mine for myself at an appreciable rate. What do I need to know and use in order to set up a wallet, acquire crypto, exchange, and spend it as anonymously as I practically can?
If you are going to spend it on mundane and legal stuff and assuming you live in mostly free country use a trustworthy exchange even if it requires KYC and spend it normally.
Keep in mind once you buy monero even from a KYC exchange they can’t track it afterwards. And this will be the safest option no real risk of getting scammed or stabbed.
If you are thinking about grey area then keep in mind that the moment something touches real world no matter whether you were using Tor, I2P or something else. It can be traced back to you. And if you are a worthwhile target LEA will spend resources to track you down.
There are ways to avoid that like using local monero and all but keep in mind those also involve different set of risks.
#NotAFinancialAdvice #NotALegalAdvice.
Do your homework and don’t get scammed or stabbed.
Once you have Monero in your wallet, when you send it it’ll be anonymous to the receiver and people won’t be able to look at the block chain and see people’s balances and transaction history. You can buy some monero on an exchange with your bank account and withdraw to get started with familiarizing yourself with crypto. Good enough in my opinion to at least learn. Exchange knows you bought Monero from them but after it’s gone from them, they won’t be able to trace around where you send stuff to
If it’s not available on any exchange you can easily move money into, you may just need to buy a different crypto and use another exchange/service to exchange again into Monero. There will be fees. Trocador is regularly mentioned from what I remember
Actual anonymous acquisition, you’re going to need to find a person in real life with monero to exchange something for it or you physical mail exchange and they send you Monero. Tough to find. Don’t know how LocalMonero is doing these days in usage/existence
Actually making payments, you got to find places that take it. Not a lot. You can pay for Mullvad VPN with Monero. Getting paid in Monero, 3 niches layered there. One is doing something people will pay you for, those same people being willing to pay in crypto, the people also having Monero. That’s tough.
Wallets, Monero website, you can probably trust Wikipedia Monero page to send you to the official website. On desktop you can download the software that downloads the whole block chain and it’ll have a GUI to send Monero and a place to copy an address for people to send to. Mobile, Cake wallet is popular
But really the hard part in my opinion is finding businesses and people that take and pay with Monero. You’ll acquire Monero to use but struggle to find places to use it for
As a general guideline, I recommend you watch a video or two about how Monero works. Don’t know how strict your threat model is but it’s always good to know what a tool can and cannot do.
I also recommend you run your own Monero node. MentalOutlaw explains pretty nicely why it’s necessary and how to do it.
As for where to spend Monero, there used to be general indexes hosted on HackLiberty and Nowhere. But of the top of my head I can recommend XMRbazaar and ProxyStore.
In case your bored, an index of some intresting material to read.